Construction sites occupy of the labors who are engaged in many different activities that can expose them to dangerous conditions. During emergencies and extreme events of natural or manmade origin in construction sites, saving labors lives is the primary objective. Therefore, the contractors are required to establish effective emergency plans which have to be improved to aid for rapid egress from construction sites. To support emergency evacuation planning, it is critical to estimate labor evacuation times during project execution. This paper presents a framework that utilizes building information modeling (BIM) and computer simulation to plan the evacuation of labors in construction sites during project execution and to visualize evacuation times of labors at emergency conditions at any time from project duration. The proposed framework utilizes Mass-Motion software as the simulation platform that enables predicting the labor evacuation times under various conditions. In addition, the evacuation time calculated from computer simulation is used to develop and evaluate the plan. A case study is worked out to demonstrate a simulation of emergency evacuation from a housing building during its construction to demonstrate the use of the proposed framework. Finally, the paper presents the simulation results of labors evacuation in the housing building construction sites.
BIM is one of the most recent acronyms to appear in the world of architecture and construction. However, the Palestinian construction industry is encountering several problems as lack of application modern information technology and the lack of interest in BIM by Palestinian universities in Gaza Strip. So, the universities adopted strategy of using BIM as an innovative technology to allow the acquisition of new skills for student. This paper investigated the current situation and future approaches to incorporating the BIM in the curriculum and main challenges facing the BIM in engineering colleges in Palestinian universities. The population consists of bachelor engineering students; quantitative approach had adopted to collect data by using a questionnaire survey specially prepared for this purpose which was distributed to student. Returned data from 152 engineering students responding to survey were subjected to proper statistical analysis. The results indicated the knowledge about the technique is low, and they were dealing with BIM applications for duration less than one year. Focused recommendation of these results, is containing this technique as educational courses in universities, and updating this courses for suiting the technology changes periodically, providing specialized academics in order to educating and credence it officially.
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